


Nearly Sane, Most of the Time

by TempleCloud



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24525037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Summary: Several years after the Escobar War, Sergeant Bothari sends a message of apology to Elena Visconti.
Relationships: Konstantin Bothari/Elena Visconti, elena visconti/original male character
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	1. Escobar

At first, I just feel baffled, and then horribly afraid. A vid recording from Barrayar? It’s not as if I have Barrayaran friends who’d want to get in touch. At first, after the war, I couldn’t remember what the Barrayarans had done to me. They made sure of that. Now that I can remember, I just wish I could forget again.

There are several flimsies in the box, along with the recording. A child’s drawings: one of a horse, one of a starship, and one of a little girl holding the hand of a tall man, whose other hand reaches up to support an even smaller boy who is sitting on his shoulders. The figures are labelled, ‘me’, ‘Da’, and, ‘Miles’. No clue as to who ‘me’ is. The figures don’t look like anyone in particular; they’re just the generic way that all children that age draw (apart from Pablo’s nephew, who draws pictures of things he’s seen through his microscope). If my child had lived, he or she would probably be drawing pictures like these.

Enough of that! It wasn’t a child, it was a ball of cells, not yet conscious. If the Barrayarans wanted to use the embryos for military research, at least they weren’t experimenting on sentient beings with a brain and nervous system, who could feel pain. But then again, a guilty voice whispers, how do we know that they didn’t let the foetuses grow to nearly full-term and _then_ experiment on them? People who routinely cut the throats of their own babies would do _anything_. If it comes to that, weren’t the Quaddie people originally designated ‘post-foetal tissue cultures’, so that they could legally be enslaved or massacred?

No – I’m not going to let myself feel guilty. If this package was sent to me by some anti-abortion fanatic trying to torment me over my decision, I’ll throw it away unopened. Though I don’t imagine there can be many anti-abortion fanatics on Barrayar. Who is this from, anyway? I peer at the label on the packaging. _To Ensign Elena Visconti_ – thank you, Barrayaran correspondent, on civilised planets we _don’t_ hang onto military titles after leaving the armed forces – _from Cordelia Vorkosigan (formerly Captain Cordelia Naismith of the Betan Astronomical Survey)_.

Ah, yes. I do remember Captain Naismith. I first met her on the shuttle from the ship to the POW camp on Sergyar: a tall, red-haired woman who asked questions about someone called Admiral Vorrutyer, whom I couldn’t remember. I felt uncomfortably that I should, and that was when I first realised that my memory problems might be more serious than just having slipped and hit my head on something.

Apparently, the conditions in the prison camp had been every bit as nightmarish as anything that happened on the ships, but we had arrived just as a new officer, Commodore Vorkosigan, had taken charge and started a clean-up campaign. Naismith was the one who first told everyone that the Barrayarans had been thoroughly defeated, and that we were all going home soon – and yet she seemed convinced that Vorkosigan would have ended the abuse of prisoners anyway, out of personal honour. Which sounded implausible for the Butcher of Komarr – but even the Barrayaran government had been sufficiently angered by the Solstice Massacre that they had punished him, and perhaps that had driven him to mend his ways.

And then a male prisoner – another Betan – revealed to us that it was Captain Naismith herself whom we had to thank for the victory, that she had been taken prisoner, escaped, and personally killed Admiral Vorrutyer. The whole camp exploded in an excited chant of ‘ _Naismith! Naismith! Naismith!_ ’ 

In the middle of it, for those of us who were close enough to hear her, Captain Naismith was trying to explain that it wasn’t quite like that. She _had_ escaped, she said, but not unaided. Admiral Vorrutyer had summoned her to his cabin, chained her up, and ordered a soldier to rape her. The soldier had refused, and, when Vorrutyer had tried to rape her himself, his subordinate had killed him, and helped Naismith escape. It sounded surprising behaviour from a Barrayaran, but not nearly as unlikely as an unarmed, chained-up, and probably naked and injured prisoner killing her attacker without any help. (Yes, that sort of thing happens in books, but how feasible is it in real life?) She wouldn’t say much about the mysterious soldier who had rescued her, except that he had been very upset about it all, and that she hoped he wouldn’t get into trouble. He had obviously been a very different kind of person from the thug whom Vorrutyer summoned to rape me (not that I could remember any of that, at the time). Perhaps she had been rescued by an idealistic young man who had imagined how he would feel if it were his sister in that situation. 

Or, more likely, it was Vorkosigan who had rescued her, and she was making up a story to keep his name out of it. There was obviously something going on between them. One morning, she was summoned from the camp to go for a walk with him, to have some kind of private conversation. She said afterwards that they had been discussing a headstone for the grave of a Betan colleague of hers who had died on Sergyar before the war, but she wouldn’t explain how that conversation had managed to take two hours.

When the first ship came to take us home, it brought a medical team who started by giving everyone a quick medical examination, including, for women and herms, a pregnancy test. I didn’t see how I could be pregnant, but I agreed to go along with it, just to get it over with. I wasn’t paying much attention, as I could overhear Naismith arguing with the doctor in the next room: ‘No, I got those bruises when the ship was hit. The cut on my thigh – yes, _that_ was Vorrutyer torturing me, but I was rescued before he could do anything else. Oh, the other fractures – those were from the soldier who rescued me. He was in shock over killing his commanding officer, and a bit later when I accidentally startled him, he panicked and attacked me. No, of c-course I’m not blaming myself, I’m just not b-blaming _him_ either. He’s c-clearly ill, and instead of curing him, they used him like a beast in a Roman circus…’

At that point, my head started to ache violently, for no reason that the doctor could identify. I needed to lie down for a while until I’d recovered, and then I had the news. I was seven weeks pregnant.

In fact, several dozen of us were. Most decided to have abortions, but a few people had other ideas: ‘Where would we be if Our Lady had refused to be the Mother of God? I’m taking mine home while I look for a family to adopt it.’ – ‘I’m keeping mine, my partner won’t mind, it’s always wanted kids, and I’ll have time to study for a Parenting Licence while we’re waiting for the baby to be born. I still think I’ll transfer it to a uterine replicator, though.’ There were only about seventeen of us who were too numb to make any decision at all, and who somehow came round to the idea of handing the foetuses over to the Barryarans, to make it their problem.

After I’d had my Caesarian, I was put on board the next shipload of prisoners to go home. I was offered counselling, and decided I might as well go along with it, even if there wasn’t much point as I couldn’t remember anything. In the middle of the first group therapy session, I started having flashbacks of Vorrutyer and his trained monster, suffered agonising migraines and threw up, and then blacked out. It wasn’t until then that we realised what had been done to me. I had assumed memory-suppression treatment was banned centuries ago, and it hadn’t occurred to me that just because something was illegal on civilised worlds didn’t mean that, for example, Barrayarans or Jacksonians wouldn’t do it. And Cetagandans would just have done something weirder and even crueller which wasn’t technically illegal because no-one but a Cetagandan would have thought of it in the first place.

I was still recovering in hospital back on Escobar when the news of events on Beta Colony came through: ‘ _War Hero Assaults Betan President. Claims Aral Vorkosigan “the Bravest Man I Ever Met”.’_ I didn’t watch the reports at the time, nor the slightly later ones about ‘ _Brainwashed War Veteran Escapes – Defects to Barrayar_.’ But I overheard gossip among the hospital staff, who all accepted uncritically the explanation that Naismith had been subjected to memory-suppression, and I thought, no. I knew what that it felt like to have my memory taken away, and Naismith was nothing like that. She was _evasive_ , because she knew perfectly well what had happened, was willing to tell most of the story to anyone who asked, but had a few bits that she was keeping quiet about, because being in love with an enemy officer in the middle of a war wasn’t the sort of thing either she or Vorkosigan would have wanted to publicise.

There were things I couldn’t talk about, either. Once I was over the memory block, it was quite straightforward to explain about being tortured and raped by a gloating, sneering Barrayaran admiral and his huge, expressionless henchman, until I was past caring and simply waiting to die, and then lost consciousness. The creepier part was what happened next. I woke up and didn’t open my eyes, but I could sense that I was somewhere safe. Someone was bathing me, dressing my wounds, lifting me into a bed, and all the while murmuring softly to me, words I couldn’t quite catch. Whoever he was, he had a Barrayaran accent, but he seemed sympathetic. I risked opening my eyes. Then I screamed. It was Vorrutyer’s monster from earlier.

And yet – it almost wasn’t. I’d thought of him as expressionless earlier, his mouth just a set slit. I hadn’t noticed the way his eyes went glassy with excitement when Vorrutyer drew lines on me with a knife, or the way he panted through his long yellow teeth, until I’d seen him not being like that. Now, with the same immobile face, as if he were carved out of stone, he somehow managed to seem normal and human, and concerned about my suffering, but practical and competent. Perhaps he had been the first-aider of his squadron, I thought, and then wondered – did Barrayarans _have_ first-aiders? I’d assumed they just cut the throats of the wounded, so as not to slow them down. But this man seemed like someone who, if his life had gone differently, might have decided to become a nurse instead of a soldier. I began to wonder whether the drooling-monster act of earlier really _had_ been just an act, to trick his master into handing me over to him. Perhaps there were some decent Barrayarans after all, I thought.

And then he raped me again.

Except that – the first time, it had been a straightforward violent attack. This time, and all the other times it happened over the next few weeks until he suddenly disappeared, he behaved as if I wanted him: as if we were lovers. He even talked to me as if I were his wife. And that was what made this so much worse than the first bout of horrors. Now he’d ruined gentleness for me.

When I came home, after I got out of hospital, I couldn’t let anyone hug me. Not even my mother, at first. Not my father or my brother, even now. And not Pablo. Pablo and I don’t even see each other in person, these days. We talk to each other over the comcomsole, usually with the visuals turned off so that it’s like the first primitive phones on Earth in the 19th century, or we just email each other. We had always been a very touchy-feely couple: holding hands, kissing and cuddling, tickling and reaching hands inside clothes and giving each other back-rubs and foot-rubs. We hadn’t got as far as actual sex when the Barrayaran invasion came, and we discussed whether to have sex before we went off to war, just in case one or both of us got killed. I said that it wouldn’t be much fun if we were in a rush, and that we should resolve that we were both going to survive, and promise ourselves that afterwards we’d go on holiday to somewhere we would have plenty of time to experiment, because I wanted our first experience to be a good one. So, instead, my first sexual experience was of being raped and impregnated and then losing the baby. 

I can’t really call Pablo my boyfriend, now, but he’s become a closer friend than ever, in the years since the war. He’s heartbreakingly patient about the way that I can’t bear to be in the same room as him, but we talk on the comconsole every evening, and he usually manages to make me laugh, now, especially when he tells me about the scrapes that his sister Maria’s little boy gets into. I used to think I was never going to laugh or smile, or cry, ever again.

I’ve told my therapist about this. But what I can’t tell her is that sometimes I’m haunted by the fear that the Monster wasn’t doing all this on purpose, to mess with my mind. What if he really _was_ as delusional as he seemed? After all, if he was doing it deliberately, it would mean he went in for much subtler cruelty than his master, and he didn’t seem that subtle. But if he really had convinced himself that I loved him, it would mean that instead of being a fiendishly sophisticated sadist, he was just a pathetic loser who couldn’t get a girlfriend, and I’d be tempted to feel sorry for him. And sympathising with your abuser is a step towards being suborned into seeing things their way. So I go on telling myself that he was obviously a psychopath and that psychopaths don’t have feelings and certainly can’t love, because for the sake of my own sanity, I _have_ to go on hating him.

The other thing I don’t want to talk about is guilt about the replicators – wondering just why the Barrayarans were so excited to get their hands on seventeen foetuses, and what kind of experiments they planned to do on them, and how far along the foetuses were when they were eventually destroyed – and what if my child wasn’t destroyed after all, but has been kept alive for some even worse fate? Everyone says that the decision was up to the Barrayarans to make, and that it’s their guilt, not ours. But if Captain Naismith had got pregnant, I’m willing to bet that she’d have fought tooth and nail, plasma arc and nerve disruptor, against anyone who tried to take her child away from her.

Perhaps the girl who drew the pictures is Naismith’s daughter. Not that the man in the drawing looks anything like Aral Vorkosigan, but children’s drawings generally don’t. Oh well, it’s time to play the recording. I don’t suppose it can make things any worse.


	2. The Message

Cordelia Naismith’s – Cordelia Vorkosigan’s – red hair is a bit longer than I remember, maybe with a few white hairs in it, her skin slightly more freckled. Not surprisingly, she looks healthier and less continually stressed than when we were in the prison camp, but right now she seems worried, and takes a moment to find words.

‘Hello, Elena. I know we only knew each other briefly, and I hope things got better for you, after the war. Now, there’s no tactful way to say this, but – the man who raped you wants to send a message of apology. It’s all right, he doesn’t have your address, and neither do I. But we thought that if we sent this recording to the Barrayaran Embassy on Escobar, somebody might be able to get it to you.’

 _We?_ She’s friends with the Monster?

‘I know the Barrayarans tried to suppress your memory of what happened, and I don’t know whether you’ve been able to have successful treatment to reverse that. So, if seeing or hearing Sergeant Bothari is going to trigger the migraines – he’s only on track 2. You can fast-forward to 3, if it helps – or ask a friend to come in and sit with you while you watch this vid, or whatever works for you.

‘Anyway, as I expect you realised – and if you hadn’t worked it out by yourself, I’m sure Admiral Vorrutyer gloated about it to you – Bothari has fairly severe mental health problems, and at the time of the Escobar War, they were particularly bad…’

I pause the recording in exasperation. Typical Betan – nothing is a crime, everything is a _problem_ that needs _therapy_! And to add to the hypocrisy, this is a Betan who absconded from a mental hospital after half-drowning a therapist and leaving her tied up! All right, I’m being unfair. I never thought Naismith actually was insane, and the Monster obviously was. But that doesn’t mean that what he did was all right, or that he doesn’t deserve punishment. After the war, we tried to start a pressure group calling for all Barrayaran war criminals to face trial, but the Barrayaran government made some excuse about the worst perpetrators being already dead, and most of the others being physically or mentally unfit to stand trial.

And yet – now I’m thinking of Maria’s little boy again. Not that I can imagine him being violent to anyone – he’s one of the most sweet-natured people I know – but he’s constantly getting into trouble for doing things that he didn’t realise he wasn’t supposed to do, or saying things he didn’t realise were tactless. He’s a very bright child, but he can’t seem to make sense of how the human world works, which is probably one of the reasons he prefers animals. Maria says that by the time he’s thirty, she doesn’t know whether he’ll be working for the Betan Astronomical Survey, or in prison. And I suppose other people could just as easily be born with a blind spot for what is moral behaviour, rather than merely for what is socially acceptable. I press Play again.

‘When he’s stable enough to be able to think coherently at all, he’s very aware of his capacity for violence, and he’s troubled by it,’ Naismith continues. ‘So he tries to deal with the situation by relying on other people to tell him when it’s right to use violence – which doesn’t work too badly unless the person in authority over him is someone even _more_ deranged than Bothari, such as Ges Vorrutyer.’

Oh, come _on_ – ‘only obeying orders’ was debunked as an excuse as long ago as the twentieth century!

‘I realise this isn’t any help as far as you’re concerned, but I think you should know that he _did_ eventually rebel against what Vorrutyer told him to do. It was very chivalrous, very dangerous, and got him into a tremendous amount of trouble, and I’ll always be grateful to him. Disobeying an authority figure isn’t an easy thing for any Barrayaran – it’s a deeply feudal society, where loyalty to your liege-lord means _everything_. My husband teaches a one-day seminar each year at the officers’ training Academy, on how to disobey an illegal order. The regular teachers complain about his teaching that, even to trainee officers, because it makes them harder to control, and there’s no way he’d be allowed to give that training to ordinary soldiers. But mercifully, some of them manage to work it out for themselves.’

She smiles a little, on that last sentence. My head is spinning as I start to make connections. Her mysterious rescuer on the ship had been the Monster. She’s talking as though she’s come to know him fairly well, in the time since the war, and she actually seems to _like_ him, as well as feeling sorry for him.

And now, it’s his turn. He’s just as ugly as I remember. I don’t get memory-suppression migraines any more, but my heart starts pounding with panic and my mouth prickles as his face shows up on my screen.

‘I don’t remember Escobar. They sent me to hell for months afterwards, while they were taking my memory of it away, and I go back there if I try to remember it. There was something they didn’t want me to know. But – I needed to find out about the rest – about you. So I asked, and it turned out that I raped you. I’d sort of guessed, anyway. I think I didn’t know _then_ that I was raping you. I thought you were my wife. Wished I could find someone who wanted to marry me. But I know it wasn’t true, and I’m sorry.’

He doesn’t look or sound sorry. His voice is the same flat monotone as always; his face doesn’t show a flicker of emotion. My mother said I looked like that when I came back from the war. I felt as though I’d been through so much feeling that I didn’t have any emotions left. Everything was dead.

Pablo said, ‘It’s just scarring. It’s the same as if you’d been burnt, or if the nerves in your face had been paralysed. I know it’s still you inside.’

Perhaps the way I felt then is the way the Monster feels _all the time?_

And – his experience of the memory-suppression drugs must have been worse than mine, if he can remember the pain of being tortured into suppressing his memories, even without remembering the memories themselves. Is he exaggerating, or did he really have to go through that for _months?_ And he’s still suffering the after-effects now.

I’d wanted all those who had abused us to be punished, but not like _that_. Well, all right – at a primitive, emotional level, if I came face-to-face with him now, I’d probably kill him, and I’d be glad I had. But as a rational, civilised person, if I was a judge asked to pass sentence, I’d want him to go to prison, and I’d want him to have to face up to the reality of his actions. I wouldn’t have wanted him to be tortured into obliterating his memories. What good does that do anyone? And it certainly hadn’t occurred to me that he might care enough to make the effort, of his own accord, to find out what he had done, when he knew that he might not like the answer.

I think I’d known all along that he really was that delusional: that he really did believe I was his wife. I don’t know why he’d think that raping me would be all right as long as I _was_ his wife, but I suppose, if I didn’t actually scream at him, ‘Get away from me, you hideous brute!’ he probably thought that meant I consented. Or perhaps he doesn’t know what ‘consent’ means. 

I hadn’t paused the recording, but he had fallen silent for several minutes, before suddenly breaking into speech again:

‘Your daughter’s called Elena. She’s beautiful, like you. I’m saving up all my pay for Elena’s dowry when she grows up, so that she can afford to marry an officer and won’t want for anything. I’ll make everything right and proper for her.’

I have a daughter? For a moment I feel too startled at this news to be properly furious that the Monster is allowed to have any contact with my child, let alone make plans for her future, and then Naismith comes back on the line again:

‘Aral brought all seventeen uterine replicator babies safely back to Barrayar, and they were all born strong and healthy.’ [Her voice shakes slightly on those last words.] ‘I’m afraid the fathers of the others didn’t want to acknowledge their children, so we managed to persuade them to make a “charitable donation” to the orphanage where their children are growing up. We’re making sure they get a good education – can you believe it, this planet doesn’t have free education for all children, or even a free Planetary Health Service – even for basic things like vaccinating babies? When I first came here, I was so naïve that I was shocked that plenty of homes here don’t have comconsoles. What I _should_ have been asking was why there couldn’t be schools and public libraries even without electricity, when they had them on Earth before the invention of computers – well, we’re working on improving matters.

‘But anyway, Bothari – had had a pretty rough childhood himself, and he was determined that his daughter was going to grow up knowing who she was, knowing that she had a father who loved and cared about her. He hired a foster carer to look after her as soon as she was born – a very sensible woman, your daughter’s in good hands – and he goes to visit about once a month. He doesn’t really trust himself to be a full-time parent, though he’s very good with my boys – I’ve got one birth son and one adopted son. But he decided that with his past, he wasn’t the best person to bring up a daughter. We do see her when she comes to stay with us in the holidays, and she and my little boy are great friends. She started school last autumn, and she’s doing well. And she wanted to say hello, too.’

A small girl on the screen, smiling and waving. She has the same features as her father, but somehow they look beautiful on her.

‘Hello, Mama! When I was little, I used to think you were dead, like Gregor’s mama, but Tante Cordelia says you live on another planet, a long way away. So when I grow up, I’m going to be a pilot, so that I can fly there and see you. I drew you some pictures and put lots of kisses on them.’

So my daughter – and the other foetuses – were all allowed to survive? But someone had definitely overheard a Barrayaran officer saying, ‘I bet Research would love to get hold of these babies.’ How had they been persuaded to change their minds? My daughter thought I was dead, I thought she was dead – and now the vid is back to Naismith again:

‘Oh, and one last thing I need to say is: thank you for my son’s life. The year after the war, while I was pregnant – a vivo pregnancy, because uterine replicators were almost unknown here then – we were exposed to a poison gas attack, and Miles would have died if we hadn’t been able to transfer him to a replicator for medical treatment. One of the ones that came here from the war with Escobar. Nobody here had seen one before – and with the rate of genetic disease here, if ever a planet needed uterine replicators, it’s Barrayar! As it is – well, Miles is still always going to be damaged, not tall and healthy like your Elena, but he’s getting better. Come to think of it, that applies to lots of people I know round here – and to Barrayar as a whole, really. It definitely applies to Bothari. I don’t like to think about what he might do if he had to go to war again, but at the moment, he’s nearly sane, most of the time. I hope you can be, too. I hope you can find peace.’

Peace? I’m crying and my heart is swimming about in my chest, and I’ve suddenly realised something. It was a _misunderstanding!_ The researchers were excited about the _replicators_ , not about the children. It’s a primitive world that still hasn’t caught up with modern technology – but it’s getting better.

That soldier – it isn’t fair to keep calling him ‘the Monster’ – thought he was making love to his (presumably willing) wife, when in fact he was raping someone who was too frightened and miserable to protest. I thought I was handing over my child to be used for military research by our enemies, when in fact I was handing her over to her adoring Papi who clearly thinks the world of her. And if his ideas of how to bring up a young girl wouldn’t be the same as mine – well, I gave away the right to make that decision. And with an experienced foster carer _and_ Cordelia Naismith to keep an eye on her, it’s hard to believe she’s in any real danger.

I might write to my daughter, and maybe send her a present. I’m not short of money, after all. Since I came back, I haven’t felt like going out, so I just go to work, come home, talk to Pablo on the comconsole, and go to sleep.

After the war, the Barrayaran government sent us compensation money, and I haven’t touched any of that, either. At the time, I was furious – how dare they try to buy us off, when what we wanted was justice? But what I really wanted was revenge. Maybe justice is something different. Maybe justice is about putting things right. Maybe I could use the money to make my life better. To try to get to being nearly sane, most of the time.

I do a quick comnet search, and make some notes, including the cost of travel to Beta Colony, and one about ‘reduced rate where there is clinical need of our services’. Then I call Pablo.

‘Elena? How are you feeling?’

‘You know that holiday we were promising we’d have after the war?’

‘Yes?’

‘How about the Orb of Unearthly Delights?’


	3. A Short While Ago, on a Planet Not So Far Away...

It had started when Sergeant Bothari had come back from a day’s leave visiting his daughter. He was back much earlier than anyone had expected him – by Cordelia’s estimate of travel times, he couldn’t have been with little Elena for more than about twenty minutes – and he looked, as far as she could see, worried. It wasn’t easy to read his emotions if he wasn’t in full-scale meltdown, but Cordelia had known him long enough to spot the signs of tension. Of course, he had far less contact with his own daughter than he did with Miles, and he was always as nervous around her as if she were even more breakable than Miles, instead of being a tough, healthy girl who would probably grow up to be an unarmed combat instructor, and could easily be a soldier if the Barrayaran army had started admitting women by the time she was eighteen. But this was something different.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

Bothari stood rigid and silent for a moment, obviously wondering how to explain this. ‘Elena kept asking questions about her mother,’ he said. ‘How did she _really_ die, where’s she buried, when can we go and burn a grave offering… If we went on talking about it, I might start remembering. So I decided Lady Vorkosigan needed me back at the Residence.’

‘Well, I don’t mind being your excuse in an emergency,’ said Cordelia. After all, Elena definitely didn’t need to see her father doubled up in agony over forbidden-memory flashbacks just because she’d asked him an innocent question. No doctor on Barrayar knew any way of reversing the memory-suppression treatment, but over the years, Bothari had become more practised at avoiding the stimuli that triggered the flashbacks and hence the migraines, at least when he was awake. There wasn’t really any way round migraines triggered by nightmares, short of taking heavy-duty sedatives every night, but he seemed to be getting nightmares related to the Escobar War less frequently as time passed and there were too many more recent things to worry about.

‘Do you want to talk about this?’ she asked. ‘I hadn’t got any particular plans for the day. Drou’s babysitting Miles, over at her house.’ She had vaguely intended to catch up on reading galactic scientific journals, but this was more urgent.

They found two comfortable armchairs to sit in, in one of the Residence’s many sitting rooms, and Cordelia called a maid. ‘Sergeant Bothari and I need to discuss confidential matters,’ she said. ‘Please could you fetch us – Sergeant, do you want anything to drink?’

‘Just water, please.’

‘A jug of water and two glasses, then. And a bucket,’ she added as a precaution. Bothari’s migraines weren’t often severe enough to cause him to vomit, but when they were, it could be very sudden. Everyone in the Residence knew that this was the result of ‘an old war injury’, which meant that he got respect rather than the reverse. Of course, when he got that ill, Cordelia was a lot more worried about whether he was going to die than about ruining the carpet, but she didn’t need to add embarrassment about making a mess to all his other problems.

‘Yes, Milady,’ said the maid. ‘Do you need the Lord Regent?’

‘No, not right now. We might need to talk with him this evening.’ At least these days Aral was sufficiently used to the idea that being happily married was something that could happen to him not to misinterpret ‘My wife is trying to help one of my friends who is going through a personal crisis,’ as ‘My wife is having an affair.’ They were all recovering to some extent from the past, but mostly they were just more aware of each other’s hang-ups.

‘Realistically, Elena was bound to start asking questions sooner or later,’ Cordelia said when they were alone. ‘From the stories you’ve made up to keep her happy, it’s obvious that her mother was someone who meant a lot to you, and she’s bright enough to realise that there are things you aren’t telling her.’

‘She mustn’t know she’s a bastard,’ said Bothari, gripping the carved wooden ends of the armchair as though it were trying to wriggle away from him, his knuckles white with tension.

‘I wish Miles didn’t have to find out that most people are going to think of him as a “mutie”,’ Cordelia pointed out. ‘But as it is, all we can do is make sure that he knows that he is a person and he matters, and that he has parents who love him, a bodyguard who loves him, and a grandfather who – can’t be left unattended with him, but quite likes him now that Miles is mobile enough to bond with him over horse-riding.’

Bothari – a man who could be trusted to supervise the Count he was liege-sworn to, in order to prevent said Count from murdering his grandson, but didn’t trust himself to be with his own daughter for more than a brief visit once a month – said nothing. Cordelia hoped she wasn’t pushing too hard. Bothari idolised her so much, and had so little confidence in his own judgement, that it wasn’t fair to argue with him the way she could with Aral, or with Alys or Drou. Making his own decisions about how to cope with being a parent was part of his journey to finding out that he could be a functional human being, and not just somebody’s hired killer. But he did seem to want her thoughts on how to deal with this situation.

‘Elena knows that she has a father who thinks the world of her and would do anything to protect her from harm,’ she went on. ‘Maybe it’s time to let her know she has a mother who lives on a different planet. I don’t know whether she’ll insist on knowing _why_ , but if it’s a problem, I can come with you and field any questions you don’t feel up to answering. But there might not be very many, just yet. Not about the precise circumstances of her conception, anyway.’

Bothari dug into his pocket and extracted a folded flimsy, which he handed across to Cordelia without a word. She unfolded it and found, painstakingly written in block capitals:

  1. _I THOUGHT SHE WAS MY WIFE (GROWN-UP ELENA – MY ELENA’S MOTHER)._
  2. _SHE WASN’T MY WIFE._
  3. _I RAPED HER._
  4. _I DIDN’T RAPE CAPTAIN NAISMITH (LADY VORKOSIGAN._
  5. _SHE SAYS I WAS ORDERED TO RAPE HER AND I REFUSED._
  6. _I AM A RAPIST._
  7. _I CANNOT TRUST MYSELF._



‘You wrote this down after we’d talked about it before?’ said Cordelia. That had been just after young Elena was born, nearly six years ago. Had he been carrying the flimsy around ever since, as a penance?

‘Soon as I’d stopped puking up. Didn’t think I’d forget it, but I had to make sure.’

‘Are you all right to talk about this? Without it bringing on headaches, I mean?’

‘It’s all right. This way it’s just facts, not memories. Like – knowing my father must have been one of my mother’s customers. It doesn’t mean I know who he was, or remember him.’ A pause. ‘He might’ve been one of the men she used to sell me to.’ Bothari fell silent again, burying his face with his hands, massaging the skin. Cordelia wondered if this was a migraine coming on, but he seemed to be just thinking how to put the next part into words. Finally, he said, ‘I don’t ever go to see Elena – my daughter Elena – for long. Don’t take her anywhere Mistress Hysopi can’t watch us. Then I can’t hurt her.’

Cordelia said gently, ‘Do you ever feel as though you might hurt her?’

‘No. But I never know how I might feel, next minute. Can’t take the risk.’

‘But you aren’t worried about being with Miles? Or Gregor or Ivan, for that matter?’

‘They’re boys.’

Cordelia didn’t bother pointing out, _So were you._ She had never asked Bothari why he didn’t bring Elena to live with them at the Residence, where, after all, there was plenty of space and one more child couldn’t make much difference. But she had sensed that he had reasons for keeping his distance from his daughter, other than generalised Barrayaran prejudice about childcare being women’s work. ‘In that case – are you all right with Elena coming to us for holidays?’

‘It’s all right when you’re there. Milady.’ The word was no mere forelock-tugging deference (not that Bothari would ever have allowed his crew-cut to grow long enough to have a forelock to tug), but a reminder that he trusted her to be in charge, to be both his conscience and his restraining chain. 

Bothari changed the subject with his usual abruptness. ‘Lieutenant Koudelka thought he’d raped Miss Droushnakovi, didn’t he? But he hadn’t.’

‘What? Oh, back during the Pretendership War. Yes, that was why she was so exasperated with him for continually trying to apologise, instead of saying anything sensible like, “I love you,” or, “Will you marry me?” You’re not the only one who misreads situations, misunderstands other people’s reactions.’ Even back home, where all children had compulsory lessons on relationships and consent from the age of five, to make sure that they were used to the idea of respecting themselves and each other long before they reached puberty and actually started experimenting, life wasn’t as straightforward as it looked. Cordelia could remember the taunting from other girls in her class, thinly disguised as concern: ‘Are you really a _virgin?_ At _sixteen?_ Don’t you think you ought to see a therapist about it?’

‘But if he _had_ raped her – would apologising have done any good?’

‘Well, if she’d been avoiding him because she was afraid of him, the way he thought, then she’d have needed to know that he understood that what he did was wrong, and that he wasn’t going to do anything like that ever again. Though even if he did apologise, she’d probably still have wanted to make sure one or other of them was reassigned to a different District, so that they wouldn’t actually meet again.’ She would have liked to add some light-hearted comment like, ‘But how he could have fooled himself that he’d somehow forced himself on her, when she’s capable of breaking him with one finger!’ but that wasn’t the point. Bothari wasn’t really talking about the Koudelkas, but trying to make sense of how apologising worked. Simon Illyan had told her once about discovering that they needed to record training vids on how to take a shower. She wondered whether there was one on how to apologise, in graded sections for the severity of the offence. If there had been a parallel one on showing clemency, the young Vorhalas louts might have lived to grow into rational beings, and Miles – _no._ Put the brake on that train of thought right now. Deal with the situation we’ve got, not the one that might have been.

‘If Ensign Elena saw me again, she’d probably kill me,’ said Bothari. ‘Could make her feel better,’ he added hopefully.

‘I don’t think it would – not for long, anyway,’ said Cordelia. ‘Most people don’t like killing people. Even you don’t, if it’s the sort of killing that brings back memories. And it wouldn’t be fair on your daughter, to be left without either parent. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t write a letter or record a vid message, and send it to the Barrayaran Embassy on Escobar, and they could pass it on to someone who might know where she lives.’ Then she remembered another possible complication. ‘I think the chief surgeon used memory-suppression treatment on her, the same way they did with you after the war,’ she said. ‘We shared a cell for a while, and she didn’t remember any of what happened then. From what I heard, the Escobaran doctors who came with the ship that picked us up after the war managed to help her recover at least some of her memory, but I don’t know how much, or whether seeing your face, even on a vid recording, could make things even worse. But she knows me, very slightly, from the prison camp. So maybe I ought to talk first on the recording, and explain what’s coming. Then she can decide whether to watch the rest, or not. Would that help?’

Bothari ran his hands over his head again, not exactly in pain, but remembering how bad the pain felt when it came. ‘Yes, please, Miladay,’ he said. And then, ‘If I plan out what I’m going to say, will you look at it? Just so that I don’t say anything that makes things worse.’

‘Yes, of course I’m willing to do that. Any time.’

‘And – can they really do that? Fix memories?’

‘There are people on Beta and Escobar who know how, yes. The knowledge just hasn’t permeated here, yet. Neither you nor Miles nor Koudelka are getting the help you need – and deserve. But you manage, all of you, somehow. Mind you, galactic therapists are a decidedly mixed blessing,’ she added. ‘And just as much influenced by politics as Barrayaran ones. Those I tangled with on Beta Colony wouldn’t have actually have taken away my memory just because the President told them to, but they were quite capable of convincing themselves that if what I told them about the Escobar War didn’t fit with what they wanted to believe, then it must mean I’d been tortured and brainwashed, rather than that they might have got things wrong. Their methods wouldn’t have been as overtly cruel as what was done to you, but they’d have been even more damaging, if I hadn’t escaped.’

They worked on the vid recording in short stages when they had time, usually during the evening, after Miles was in bed and before Aral got home from work. One evening, when it was as complete as it seemed likely to be, they heard a voice calling from outside the door. ‘Mama? Sergeant? Can I come in?’ Miles had learnt the hard way that a knock on a solid wooden door that was loud enough to be heard was enough to break his hand, and that, even now that he was finally able to walk upright, he still wasn’t tall enough to reach door-handles.

‘Hello, Miles,’ said Cordelia, opening the door. ‘Is there a problem, or are you just bored?’

‘Elena’s making a vid recording to send to her mama on Escobar,’ said Miles. ‘We talked on the comconsole, and she told me. Are you and Sergeant Bothari on the recording, too?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Well, can I talk to Elena’s mama as well, please? I want to tell her about riding Grandda’s horses.’

‘No, I think the three of us talking is enough,’ said Cordelia. ‘And she doesn’t know you, after all.’

‘Why doesn’t Elena’s mama live here?’ Miles asked. ‘Most Armsmen have wives who live here – in Vorbarr Sultana, I mean, or in the country, near Grandda’s house. Is it true there’s an Armsman who’s got two wives? Mama, could Da have another wife as well as you? Could you have another husband?’

Bothari glanced at Cordelia as if pleading with her to deal with this one. ‘Miles, if you ask lots of questions at once, it doesn’t give anyone a chance to answer them,’ she pointed out. ‘But, starting with the first one – you know that I come from another planet, too, don’t you? From Beta Colony?’

‘Where it’s hot and dry and people live in tunnels underground, and it doesn’t ever rain or snow, and there aren’t any horses except a few in zoos,’ said Miles.

‘That’s right. Well, Escobar and Beta Colony were at war with Barrayar, before you were born. Now – holovids make it look as though war is the goodies fighting against the baddies, don’t they? Heroic Barrayaran soldiers fighting off the Cetagandan invaders?’

‘Grandda fought the Cetagandans,’ said Miles, as though he suspected her of dismissing the Cetagandan War as fictional. ‘And then Grandda and Da fought against Mad Emperor Yuri, when Da was as old as Gregor is now.’

‘Well, yes. But not all enemies are Cetagandan invaders or Mad Emperor Yuri. Most of the time, it means you’re fighting against normal people – people you’d want to be friends with. Well – your Da and I _did_ become friends, and fall in love, obviously, but that doesn’t always happen. More often, war means either killing people, or hurting them so badly that they don’t want to be friends with you, even when it’s over.’

Miles took in the implications of this. ‘So if Elena was on Escobar with her mama, and there was another war when we were grown up, I might be fighting _her?_ I might _kill_ her?’

‘Yes. Or you might hurt her really badly. Now, if she was _dead_ , there wouldn’t be anything you could do…’

‘They might cryoprep her and take her back home to come alive again.’

‘Yes, they might. But you wouldn’t be there to help with that. You’d be the dreaded Barrayaran enemy, remember. But you could still send a message for her to read or watch when she was alive again, saying you were sorry.’

‘And then would she be friends with me, the way you and Da are?’

‘Maybe. Probably not. It depends on the circumstances. But that’s not the point of apologising. It’s to let the other person know that you know you’ve done something wrong.’

‘If I hurt someone when I was in disguise, so they didn’t know it was me, would I still have to apologise?’

‘ _Yes,_ ’ said Cordelia firmly.

‘What if – what if they mustn’t know it was me in the disguise? What if I was a secret agent?’

‘That’s a good question,’ said Cordelia. ‘But maybe we should discuss it in the morning. It’s time you were asleep. Will you be able to sleep?’ she asked, suddenly concerned. Why had she let this conversation get started, at this hour of night? Why had she planted in a five-year-old’s mind the prospect of an alternative universe in which he killed his best friend, and then expected him to _sleep?_ Normally she was better at switching mental gears between adult-level and five-year-old-level conversation.

‘Yes, only – Elena and I _can_ be soldiers when we grow up, can’t we? Ivan says we can’t because they don’t let girls or muties in, but we will, won’t we? Even if we don’t get to fight when we’re eleven, like Da, we can still go to the Academy when we’re eighteen, can’t we?’

Cordelia realised she had been underestimating the militarism of Barrayaran children. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what happens.’


End file.
